Mr. Westheimer

Serial entrepreneur Nate Westheimer is something of a renaissance technologist.

Picturelife, the photo startup he cofounded with OMGPOP founder Charles Forman, recently raised a $4 million round led by Spark Capital. Picturelife's concept is timely: the service focuses on backing up, storing, and accessing all of your photos from the cloud. That got the attention of a number of other notable investors, including Crunchfund, Founder Collective, Lerer Ventures, Highline Venture Partners, Betaworks, David Karp, SV Angel, and Chris Dixon. Mr. Forman put some of the "way more" than $22 million he earned from OMGPOP's sale to Zynga and former Zynga GM Nabeel Hyatt, a partner at Spark, joined Picturelife's board.

But that venture is hardly enough to keep the prolific Mr. Westheimer, who once penned a sweat lodge manifesto about teaching himself to code, fully occupied. He's also an advisor at Flybridge Capital and has been executive director of  New York Tech Meetup since 2008. (Coincidentally, the last time we made a list of "Insurgents" to watch--all the way back in 2008!--Mr. Westheimer made the cut.)

Today, Mr. Westheimer reached out to announce that he is launching a "small seed fund" called Red Bud Partners that will invest in the New York tech community that he actively helped grow. The fund, which will have an average investment size of $25,000, has already made one as-yet-undisclosed deal, he said.

On his blog, Innonate, Mr. Westheimer explained that the fund, which he launched with his father Dick, will focus on "networked technology."

This idea comes from my observation over the past few years that “information technology” and “web technology” no longer describe everything that’s interesting. “Networked Technology” encompass not only incredible new web and mobile technology, but also the array of new hardware projects which are springing up showing great promise to change the world we live in. We want to invest in all of it.

By email, Mr. Westheimer clarified that the fund "has absolutely no affect on Picturelife being my 24/7 100% job and life," he said. "Now I just have a vehicle to make investments in companies I come in contact with during the course of Picturelife and everything else I do."

Was anyone really worried Mr. Westheimer couldn't multitask? Oh ye of little faith.

Mr. Forman (via twitter/charlesforman)

The New York Times got a ticket to OMGPOP's after-acquisition party at the Bowery Hotel last week where they ran into the startup's founder, Charles Forman, who was in such a daze over the $180 million deal with Zynga that he walked into traffic.

Mr. Forman, who left the company in 2011, but retained his stake, told the Times he made "way more" than $22 million from the sale, adding, "It’s the kind of money where I’ll be wearing whatever I want when somebody invites me to a wedding."

We never really thought to measure "fuck you" money in terms of prescribed wedding attire, but godspeed to any groom that wants Mr. Forman as his best man.

As the Times notes, although Mr. Forman and CTO E. J. Mablekos created OMGPOP's first drawing game, a web-based attempt called Draw My Thing that put a timer on guessing the word in the picture, Draw Something was created after Mr. Forman left the company.

In fact, two former employees told the paper that OMGPOP, which raised $17 million since 2006, was on its way to running out of money by May and likely would have shuttered if not for CEO Dan Porter and the team of five behind Draw Something, which took the game mobile and eliminated time limits and the idea of assigning a winner and loser.

While Mr. Forman, who is currently working on the stealth startup Picturelife with Nate Westheimer, may now feel entitled to forgo a suit at your wedding, it looks like he's playing nice with his new benefactors. Shortly after the conference call announcing the sale, Mr. Forman tweeted his thanks to Mr. Porter and investor Bijan Sabet, whose firm Spark Capital participated in OMGPOP's Series A and Series B rounds, but took a more snide tone towards Zynga and CEO Mark Pincus:

That tweet has since been deleted from Mr. Forman's account, leaving just two updates on his Twitter profile: one about Draw Something being the #1 free app on iTunes and his first message to the world from May, 2007, "im pooping."